Odds and Ends

And now for something completely different, I'll ramble about some stuff because I have a few minutes to kill at work:

• Mabel the Teddy Bear, the prize possession of a very young Elvis Presley, met with a gruesome end after an encounter with Barney the Guard Dog. The bear, which was an original Roosevelt-era toy from 1909, was valued at around $75,000. The owner of the bear, Sir Benjamin Slade, was quoted as being "not very pleased at all". On the bright side, this puts Sir Benjamin in the lead for the 2006 Understatement of The Year.
  
• Apparently The Christmas Shoes, which I mentioned two posts ago as supposedly being the saddest song ever recorded, was also a bestselling book and a TV movie. Sorry I missed out on all that... By the way, the video can be seen here, if you dare.
  
• After all this talk of gloom and destruction, it's nice to see some things being recovered. An Irish construction worker found a medieval Book of Psalms in a bog, where it had apparently been dropped by raider 1,200 years earlier.
  
• Elsewhere, another medieval prayer book has been found to contain a lost work of Archimedes beneath its original text. I can only hope it includes plans for his greatest invention, the original Death Ray. But I'm not that optimistic.
  

In closing, the magical wonderland known as YouTube is crawling with Star Wars parodies. Some are funny (and many are not), but few can compare with this: